The Canadian diamond industry has been lauded as a new approach to resource extraction, one whose institutions are characterized by a greater attention to Indigenous rights and the environment. However, an institutional analysis obfuscates the terrain of unequal relations that is the context for the Canadian diamond boom; an analysis of the effectiveness of social and environmental policies in relation to the extraction of diamonds in the Canadian North suggests that there is an intent on the part of those instigating this extraction (that is, the Canadian state, Canadian capitalist interests and international capitalist interests) to protect the Northern environment and to provide economic benefits to Northern Indigenous communities. This piece argues, instead, that this assumption is erroneous and that the Northern mining industry is part of Canada’s project of internal colonization of Indigenous communities, a project that has intensified and expanded in the neoliberal era.
Filed under: Canada, Scholarship and insights | Closed
How do the perpetrators of mass killing legitimise their behaviour? This article examines the legitimation of some of the worst cases of mass killing in the past two centuries. It finds that the colonial experience helped establish a moral framework that facilitated arguments designed to place whole groups beyond normal legal and moral protection on account of some assigned traits. This moral framework was evident in different colonial settings and rested on claims negating the right of the victim group to protection and claims valourising their violent extermination. It also underpinned the moral justifications offered by perpetrators of some of the twentieth century’s worst episodes of mass killing. This article examines the “family resemblances” between the arguments used by perpetrators in different settings, indentifies their common structure, and examines the factors that influenced their capacity to secure legitimacy for mass killing.
Filed under: Empire, Genocide, Scholarship and insights | Closed
We are interested in papers that address the following broad topics and themes:
• The political economy of land grabbing
• The discourse and contested meaning of “empty lands”, “unoccupied lands” or “underused lands”
• The role of multinational corporations, sovereign wealth funds (notably from Europe and the Gulf States), private equity funds as well as financial institutions in land grabbing
• The role of transnational institutions such as (World Bank, USAID, FAO, EU, African Development Bank etc..) in shaping the discourse of land deal politics
• The role of “south-south” land grabbing particularly by China, Brazil, India and South Africa
• The role of domestic capital, government investment corporations and local elites in land grabbing
• The presumed delivery of jobs, technological transfer and local development that arise from large-scale land deals
• The impact of land grabbing on poverty, local food security, landlessness and environmental degradation
• The multitude of ways in which social movements contest land grabbing for the right to life and livelihoods, local resources, and sustainable development
More details here.
Filed under: Africa, Asia, Call for papers, Political developments, Scholarship and insights | Closed
In the last two decades, there has been widespread application of the term “indigenous” in relation to various groups worldwide. However, the meaning of this term and its uses tend to be inconsistent and variable. The expression derives from the interaction of different cultures—the meeting between the original inhabitants of a specific region (known variously as “first nations,” “natives,” “indigenes,” or “aborigines”) and new, foreign “settlers” or “colonizers,” who imposed their alien value systems and way of life on the indigenous populations.
In Israel, the indigenousness claim has been raised over the past few years by the country’s Bedouin citizens, a formerly nomadic, Arabic-speaking group centered in the southern arid part of the country, the Negev. They argue that Israel denies their basic indigenous rights such as maintaining their traditions and owning their own lands.
and, from the conclusion:
Although there is no official definition of indigeneity in international law, Negev Bedouin cannot be regarded as an indigenous people in the commonly accepted sense. If anything, the Bedouin have more in common with the European settlers who migrated to other lands, coming into contact with existing populations with often unfortunate results for the latter.
Filed under: Human Rights, Israel/Palestine, law, Political developments, Scholarship and insights | Closed
The disintegration of the British National Party (BNP) has removed the threat of the party securing a place in the political mainstream in the UK. But, in coming close to this objective it has succeeded in renewing and legitimising both its own claims to speak on behalf of the indigenous people of Britain, as well as the similar claims of other groups such as the English Defence League (EDL), the English Democrats and the Freedom Party. Rather than assessing the impact of the BNP in terms of the number of votes and councillors, this article contends that the renewal of racist discourse may enable far right views and ideologies to penetrate and gain acceptance in mainstream British society over the next decade. This article examines the re-shaping of the rhetoric of indigeneity by the BNP to legitimise racism. Using articles originally written for the BNP magazine Identity between 2006 and 2008 and extracted from the BNP website in advance of the 2010 elections, this article discursively analyses the way in which the BNP deploys the concept of indigeneity in its constructions of social groups in Britain. It is suggested that the potential (mis)use of indigeneity as a legitimising vehicle for racist and illiberal views and policies is exacerbated by the lack of clear definitional boundaries around the concept of indigeneity itself.
Filed under: Europe, Political developments, Scholarship and insights | Closed
The modern international system is commonly argued to have originated within Western Europe and spread globally during centuries of colonialism. This article argues, instead, that the character of the modern system of territorially sovereign states resulted from a complex interaction between European colonizing polities and events, actors, and spaces in other parts of the globe. In particular, through a process of colonial reflection, many of the foundational ideas and practices of modern statehood were formed in the interactions of Europeans with the unknown, supposedly empty, spaces of the New World in the 16th and 17th centuries. These novel practices were applied only later to politics among states in Europe. Most important among these developments is the ideal of territorial exclusivity as the sole basis for state sovereignty. This analysis also has implications for the study of contemporary international systemic change.
Filed under: Empire, Europe, law, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty | Closed
Mobility was constitutive of the 19th century British colonial period in the Pacific. The circulation of capital and commodities, technologies of transportation and communication, travelling ideologies and systems of governance and surveillance, as well as the movement of explorers, whalers, labourers, settlers, missionaries, colonial administrators, convicts, soldiers, sojourners, immigrants, and transnational and displaced indigenous peoples, all shaped the politics and the period.
Filed under: Australia, New Zealand, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Robert A. Williams Jr., Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization (Palgrave, 2012).
From one of the world’s leading experts on Native American law and indigenous peoples’ human rights comes an original and striking intellectual history of the tribe and Western civilization that sheds new light on how we understand ourselves and our contemporary society. Throughout the centuries, conquest, war, and unspeakable acts of violence and dispossession have all been justified by citing civilization’s opposition to these differences represented by the tribe. Robert Williams, award winning author, legal scholar, and member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe, proposes a wide-ranging reexamination of the history of the Western world, told from the perspective of civilization’s war on tribalism as a way of life. Williams shows us how what we thought we knew about the rise of Western civilization over the tribe is in dire need of reappraisal.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed
